Steven Paul, was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February 1955. Soon after the family moved to Los Altos, California where teachers remember Steve Jobs as a "loner" and "always had a different way of looking at things". Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in Palo Alto, California, where he was soon hired as a summer employee. While working their as a summer intern, Jobs met Stephen Wozniak. In 1972 Jobs graduated high school and started taking philosophy classes at Reed College in Portland. In 1974 Jobs took a job as a video game designer at
Atari, Inc., where he saved enough money to adventure on a trip to India. He traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. When he returned to California, he began attending meeting of Wozniak's "Homebrew Computer Club". Job's was not interested in creating electronics and was nowhere near as good an engineer as Wozniak, but he had his eye on marketability of electronic products and persuaded Wozniak to work with him toward building a personal computer. Jobs and Wozniak designed the Apple I computer in Job's bedroom and they built the prototype in the Job's garage. Jobs showed their inventions to a local electronics equipment retailer, who ordered twenty-five computers. Jobs and Wozniak envisioned starting a computer company that would produce and sell computers. Together they raised $1,300 to start their company. Jobs came up with the name of their new company Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.
Many Colleagues describe Jobs as a brilliant man who can be a great motivator and positively charming. At the same time his drive for perfection is so strong that employees who did not meet his demands are faced with verbal attacks that can eventually burn out even the most motivated of people. Job's drive for perfection often leads people to be very afraid of him and